You’ll see them influence each other’s lives, you’ll see what they are capable of up and doing, and you’ll see them come to various ends. And this process of discovering the story will often take place in fits and starts. Don’t worry about it. Keep trying to move the story forward. There will be time later to render it in a smooth and seamless way. John Gardner wrote that the writer is creating a dream into which he or she invites the reader, and that the dream must be vivid and continuous. I tell my students to write this down—that the dream must be vivid and continuous—because it is so
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